Conventionally, there has been known a vehicle air conditioning apparatus including an air conditioning case that accommodates an evaporator for cooling air and a heater for heating the air, and a fan unit that supplies the air into the air conditioning case. The air conditioning case and the fan unit are provided in an instrument panel disposed in the front side of the vehicle interior.
In this vehicle air conditioning apparatus, by detaching the instrument panel to expose the air conditioning case and the fan unit to the vehicle interior, components such as the evaporator and the heater in the air conditioning case and an electric motor of the fan unit can be maintained and replaced.
In order to replace the components of the vehicle air conditioning apparatus, a number of work processes, such as removal of the instrument panel, and removal of the components from the air conditioning case and the fan unit, are required. Therefore, the work for replacing the component of the vehicle air conditioning apparatus would be cumbersome.
To address this problem, there has been known a vehicle air conditioning apparatus that can replace the evaporator from the outside of the vehicle interior. In this vehicle air conditioning apparatus, the air conditioning case and the fan unit are disposed in the front side of the vehicle interior, and an opening is formed in a separating plate which separates the vehicle interior from the outside of the vehicle interior, so that the evaporator can be replaced from the front surface side of the vehicle via the opening (see, for example, Patent Literature 1).